I wrote Audible Signs (just published by Continuum) for anybody who loves music, for everybody who feel passionately that this love can be investigated but never fully explained, for all who seek (like me) new ways of conversing intelligently about music, new strategies to honor both its exceptional clarity of feeling and its irreducible mystery.

The impetus to compose these “Essays from a Musical Ground” goes back to 1991, when I launched a newsletter called Musings, my way of keeping in musical touch with far-flung friends, some of whom play an active role in Audible Signs (I couldn’t have written the book without them).Musings ran to a single issue.Marriage, commissions for new musical works, parenthood, all intervened.But that essay—Vol. 1, No. 1—haunted me down the years and led to further essays, some for my students at Vanderbilt University, others for concertgoers in Nashville who enjoy grand opera at least as much as the Grand Old Opry.The lone issue of Musings now serves its turn in Audible Signs: it has been revised, expanded, and mounted as one piece of artillery in my fourfold assault (Chapter 4) on Alex Ross’s bestselling book on twentieth-century music, The Rest Is Noise.

The commingling of “Hey Jude,” Beethoven’s Ninth, and Shakespeare’s Sonnet #8 (in Chapters 2 and 3) springs from ongoing conversations over the years with students in my Beethoven and the Beatles course.I started “ Letter to My Daughter” a few years ago, but it was only last winter—as I was finishing the book—that Regina Spektor came into view as an ally of Rembrandt .The other essays in Audible Signs are newly minted, struck with the hot iron of all the great music reverberating between its two covers.

A further word about my argument with Ross, for those readers who (I hope) will have fun reading Chapter 4.I could easily have written at length about the things I enjoy in The Rest Is Noise.Why, then, in Audible Signs have I lodged such a litany of grievances against a book I generally admire?First things first: just as there is no need to have listened to the music I write about in Audible Signs before reading it, it’s not required to read Ross’s book before diving into my disputation with him.What’s at stake here is a principle that drives everything in my book—an idea that motivates all my work, all the more so the music I compose:

We show our love for people and things by paying close attention to them,

by putting them at the center of our imaginative regard and celebrating them in all their complexity.My goal in cataloguing the shortcomings of Ross’s The Rest Is Noise is to encourage both his readers and mine to love more richly the difficult musical repertory he and I are both tackling.Perhaps I have taken my notion of “tackling” a bit too far in my pugnacious attitude towards Ross.Therefore, I’m grateful to have this opportunity to say once again that I remain a faithful—i.e., disputatious—fan of Ross’s writings on music.

Friday, August 27, 2010

Of the many many hundreds of proposals we've received since 2003 for books in the 33 1/3 series, if I remember correctly only one has offered to tackle its subject in the format of epic verse. And annoyingly I can't remember what the album in question was - but it certainly wasn't Men at Work's 1981 opus, Business as Usual.

There's a poem in the current issue of the New Yorker by Julie Bruck. Here it is, reproduced without permission. (If anyone wants me to remove it, just let me know.)

MEN AT WORK

I said, “Do you speak-a my language?”He just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich. —“Down Under.”

We middle-aged sense them immediately:

four brittle pop stars sprawled across

the rigid fibreglass chairs at the airport gate.

It’s not just that they’re Australian, that gorgeous

thunk of English, the stacked electric-guitar cases

draped with black leather jackets, or their deep

tans on this Sunday night in midwinter Toronto

that holds everyone’s attention, drawn as we are,

pale filings to their pull. Even their rail-thin

lassitude attracts us, as it must Doug, the portly

Air Canada gate manager in his personalized jacket,

who arrives to greet the band, cranking hands

and cracking jokes. Doug, who must live in

Mississauga with the wife and a couple of kids,

and who insists the boys come back to play Toronto

next year, when we clutchers of boarding passes

will have abandoned our carry-ons for tickets

to a midsized arena and a resurrected band

whose lyrics never did make sense but

which are laced to a beat that won’t let go—

propelling us down the carpeted ramps

of late-night flights on feeder airlines, hips

back in charge of our strange young bodies,

now shaking down runways in rows.

Is that poem any good? I have absolutely no idea. And could somebody write a poem about Men Without Hats, too?

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

"This is perhaps the best use of puerility I've seen in a while, and like some of Mark Twain's funniest rants, it's characterized by an unusual energy, a full-fledgedness that's hilarious, in part, because it's so very cute--an impotent, multidirectional, adorable rage. This is how the song manages to be intense and light at the same time, angry and hilarious--like some of Twain's less sporting pot-shots at the literary lights of a previous generation. It's indulgent, childishly so, and that's what makes it appealing."

Michaelangelo Matos, author of Vol.10 in the series, on Prince's Sign 'O' the Times, has a good piece up today at the Daily Beast, on the song of the moment, Cee-Lo's "Fuck You". (Although labeling it as such makes the song seem more fleeting than it is: I'm pretty sure this thing has some serious legs.)

An extract here:

That’s true of the music as well. R&B has tended to be the most consistently forward-looking of pop styles, but over the past few years it’s been bitten hard by the retro bug, as recent albums from Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, and Raphael Saadiq demonstrate. Sometimes referred to as “throwback,” this style emits a very different vibe from the “neo-soul” codified by D’Angelo and Erykah Badu, ’60s punchy rather than ’70s languid. It’s also become a comfortable go-to style for current artists—there’s a lot of it on the new Fantasia album, for example. Cee-Lo has utilized it plenty—Gnarls Barkley’s “Run,” from The Odd Couple, is a clear example—and “Fuck You” cements it in R&B’s modern firmament.

We thought after 5 years, it was about time to update the look of the blog to something slightly more modern. (Thanks, Ally Jane!) I believe that means that Ed Park's blog is quite possibly the last blog in the entire world wide web using the "dots" template. Truly the end of an era...We will be adding some features to the column to the right. Most notably, the answers to our two most frequently asked questions: "How/when can I submit a proposal to write a 33 1/3?" and "Where can I find a list of all the 33 1/3s in print?" We don't have it up just yet, but soon we will be able to point you somewhere other than wikipedia. Let us know if there's any other information (within reason) that you would like to see on here.

It's still a work in progress, and we're looking forward to doing a little more with the blog over the coming weeks and months, including broadening the scope a little bit to include more of our other music and sound art books, which are equally fantastic, even if they don't come in a uniform small trim size with cute multicolored spines.

In the meantime, here are some random music-related links (In other words, please allow me to clean out my bookmarks):

NY Magazine asks which songs have benefited from their censored radio edits. (A sidenote: to me, the definitive versions of all John Hughes movies and all of the Police Academy franchise are the TBS censored-for-TV versions.)

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

On this summer's American Carnage tour, two of the biggest old-school thrash bands are performing classic albums from 1990. Megadeth are playing the guitar landmark Rust in Peace, and Slayer are tearing through all of Seasons in the Abyss, an album that helped pave the way for other classic records — including Jeff Buckley's debut and one by Cleveland's Integrity. Seriously.

Abyss' bone-dry production represents Slayer at their tightest. The hesher heavyweights were always palatable to punks, and the album's sludgy slow jams were influential to a wave of hardcore bands like Integrity. It was co-produced by Rick Rubin and engineering ace Andy Wallace, who later mixed Nirvana's Nevermind and produced Buckley's Grace. Rubin is still the band's executive producer, but back then he and Wallace were active participants in the creative process.

Guitarists Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King had dominated the previous albums' lyrics and music, but Abyss is heavy on singer-bassist Tom Araya's songs. He penned four of Abyss' ten tracks and co-wrote another two with Hanneman, who was his roommate during the recording. Araya recently looked back on the album and broke it down, track by track.

Friday, August 06, 2010

Housing Works Bookstore Café Thursday at 7 p.m., a discussion on the Hawaiian musician Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, who died in 1997, with Dan Kois, author of “Facing Future,” a book about Mr. Kamakawiwo’ole, and with Nate Chinen, who writes about jazz for The New York Times. The ukulele players Andy Kulana Wang and Jason Poole will play. 126 Crosby Street, SoHo , (212) 334-3324, housingworksbookstore.org; free.

One of my good friends has a nephew who's interested in music turning 16 in a little bit and she has come up with a brilliant birthday present: she has commissioned an esteemed high court of her friends (including myself) to come up with a mixtape for her nephew composed of songs for someone turning 16, or songs that someone turning 16 should know about.

I've been going through some stuff the last few days, and let me tell you, it's been a long time since I thought about being 16--it's something I avoid at all costs, actually--but it turns out that it's a whole new way of looking at your music collection. (A whole new AWESOME way of looking at your music collection.)

In a few weeks, I'll post what I came up with for my mixtape, but in the meantime, I'd be curious to hear what you think are essential songs for surviving their 16th year. This is your chance to play the role of the corrupting big brother or sister, if you haven't had the pleasure already. Go for it in the comments field...

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Egg City Radio has a wonderful 30 minute phone interview with Betty Davis*, archived from an old Sound of Young America radio show. The cognitive dissonance that mounts over the course of the interview--between the soft-spoken, introverted, mom-like spoken voice of Davis today, and the over-the-top fire-spitting soulful funk of Davis's singing in the musical interludes--it's really incredible. Here is a person who is extremely comfortable in her own skin.